Blend
by Diane LD
Summary: There is a place between Moscow and Los Angeles. Julia vs. Sydney.


**BLEND**

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**Author:** donnatellaMarks

**Character**: Sydney Bristow

**Feedback**: Duh. Welcomed and appreciated. Sundevil009yahoo.com

**Distribution**: Uh, ff.net, possible sd-1… Anyone else, take it. Just tell me about it, so I can brag to my friends about how cool I am. ;P

**Rating**: PGish…

**Disclaimer**: Psshht.

**Summary:** There is a place between Moscow and Los Angeles. Julia vs. Sydney.

**A/N**- My first real Alias fic. All feedback is appreciated.

So it begins…

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There is a place between Moscow and Los Angeles.

The shrill rings of her cell phone, the sharp tones of a father, a lover, a brother. She shuts it off and basks in the welcome silence.

She flies coach. She can afford much better, but she doesn't. She listens to the normal people, on their vacations and their business trips and their first plane rides; screaming babies interrupt her quiet daydreams and she smiles because that's exactly the way it should be.

The stewardess smiles, her shiny teeth gleaming. Her seat partner is some old woman blabbering on about her grandchildren, and she smiles politely, not really hearing a word. The old woman is encouraged, however, and continues her diatribe about how her son Thomas married some whore of French woman, how he was tricked into throwing his life away.

The in-flight movie plays, but she's seen it before. She's been on planes almost constantly since she got back, and they don't really change the selection all that often.

Maybe she can rest, she reasons, so she requests a pillow in the vain hope she might be able to get some rest.

But she won't.

She knows this.

She hasn't slept a full night's sleep for two years.

The plane arrives just on time, and she grips her hand rest tightly as the captain makes his descent. 15,000 feet and falling, falling, falling….

Her hand grips the seat tightly, and her nails dig into her palms, making tiny little half-moon indentations, white against her flushed pink skin.

Sydney has never minded flying. Only landings. She chides herself for the hundredth time; one would think thousands of flights for SD-6, the CIA, and apparently the Covenant would anesthetize the paralyzing fear she feels every time the plane gently inclines downwards to meet its destination.

The plane's wheels bump against the runway, and she breathes a sigh of relief. Another safe arrival.

It's dusk, when she glances out the window, and she sees the city begin to turn on the night lights.

She wears a dress of brown and gold; it shimmers in the fading sunlight. She steps off the plane and breathes the fresh air; she breathes air free from the LA smog she's grown accustomed to. She once contemplated moving away from LA, if only to escape the choking smog. Sydney's always loved the fresh air; when she was five, her mother convinced her dad to take them camping in Yosemite. She's loved the outdoors ever since; she secretly favors any Op where she can hike through a dense forest or a tree-studded mountain.

And she imagines the days when she and Danny had talked about kids, and how they would take them camping and teach them to make fires and find shelter. How they would be any other family on a brief vacation, smiling, laughing, enjoying each others company underneath the shaded trees.

She imagines them getting out of LA, to a suburb close by, with good schools and an easy commute to the university hospital. Maybe she'd stop working and stay home with the baby; maybe she could be the mother that hers never was.

She still believed in her dreams back them. She still believed that maybe, someday, she could get out of this life.

She smiles slightly, but it's a grim smile of remembrance, the only kind she'll allow herself these days. Remembrance. It has become important to her. Two years were taken from her: her lover married another woman, her life had gone up in flames, her ashes were spread out along the southern California coastline.

She wears a hat, dark sunglasses, anything to hind her shining eyes. She's sick of crying all the time, she sick of their pitied looks, she's sick of being Poor, Pathetic Sydney.

But she doesn't know how to stop it.

Sometimes she wishes she could just disappear, fade into the night. She wishes more than anything that she was Julia Thorne again, because Julia would have pillaged and killed and stolen anything she could have, no remorse. Julia Thorne would have shot Sydney Bristow.

Sydney has decided she really couldn't blame her if she did.

She can fool herself, she can rip her heart our and cut it into a thousand little pieces and still none of this would get any better.

There is a place between Moscow and Los Angeles.

It is a place between her two selves, her two halves. Between Sydney Bristow in LA, and Julia Thorne on the other side of the world.

She goes to the place where the halves diverge, where they blend seamlessly together to create the person she is.

She's not the perfect CIA agent, Jack Bristow's daughter, or Michael Vaughn's lover anymore.

She's not an unrepentant murderess, hedonist, sadist anymore either.

She's just Sydney. Half of each, blended together in a tight package of muscles, sinew and pure passion.

She doesn't know anything anymore.

But that's okay, she decides.

Because there is a place between Moscow and Los Angeles.

It's the only place she really feels comfortable enough to relax her tensed and tightened shoulders; it's the only place where she can sit beneath a starry night sky on a splintered porch swing and drown her pain in endless glasses of lemonade.

It's the only place she can smile for no reason at all, or forget what day of the week it is, or immerse herself completely in dreams and not feel the littlest bit naïve.

She can lay her gun on the table, and it won't make anybody uncomfortable. She can snore and sing ABBA in the shower at the top of her lungs like she used to. She can scream_ 'Fernando'_ and croon '_Dancing Queen'_ into her soap-microphone. She can steam up the bathroom so badly her reflection is barely visible in the foggy mirror.

She can use her favorite kitchen knifes for target practice, throwing one after another into a mostly cardboard dummy and scoring direct hits to its heart, lungs, and brain.

Then she can pull the knife from the dummy's body and use it to cut up the cucumbers that she'll put into the salad for tonight's dinner.

She's not either of her halves, she's part of each and the combination is painful, but it's hers and hers alone.

She's Sydney Bristow: CIA agent, daughter, murderer, thief, friend, enemy; all wrapped into one, and the only place she feels at home is a place between Moscow and Los Angeles.

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Reviewing is good karma. Really. It is. :)


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